Why did we choose the chicken as our main animal of choice for food?

To start the chasing weird series off lightly, here is a less mind messing exploration yet strange concept if you can get your head in the right mind space:

Type ‘chicken as food’ into Wikipedia and you will get the obvious and boring answer: “…ease and low cost of raising them…” which will quickly quell this question. However, take a step back and really think about this question.

One day some person has walked past a bird in a Southern Region of Asia and thought; I am going to try and eat that bird. As we all know, that person enjoyed the bird and found some more, maybe even kept a few and bred them to keep themselves chicken ready for the rest of their lives. All of this makes sense to me as a local tribe setting lures and traps to capture them as a source of food… until we zoom out thousands of years to today to find that chicken is the number one meat consumed worldwide and is mass bred in millions.

Look at it from a chickens point of view. One day they were minding their own business in a Southern region of Asia and now they are found in every (almost) country in the world. If they had the ability to have self awareness as do humans, they may even be asking now, why us? As if we had singled them out and selected them.

Further to this, who passed on the information about a chicken being a great animal to eat? From a small subcontinent in India to worldwide. The next time you are walking through some woodland, look at the first animal you see and try and get into the mindset of the person who began the destiny for the chicken. Imagine trying to catch it, cook it, eat it, realise it tastes great and who you’d tell about it. Then ask yourself, would you do it all over again if you knew in a few thousand years time that this little species of bird would be exploited to the world, cultivated in millions per year as the number one source of meat?